As some of you might know, I'm the Director for linux.conf.au 2013. I've tried really hard to not use my powers for evil and make the entire conference about OpenStack -- in fact I haven't pulled rank and demanded that specific content be included at all. However, the level of interest in OpenStack has grown so much since LCA 2012 that there is now a significant amount of OpenStack content in the conference without me having to do any of that.

I thought I'd take a second to highlight some of the OpenStack content that I think is particularly interesting -- these are the talks I'll be going to if I have the time (which remains to be seen):

The OpenStack Miniconf: this is a mostly-clear winner for Tuesday. Tristan Goode has been doing a fantastic job of organizing this miniconf, which might not be obvious to people who haven't been talking to him a couple of times a week about its progress like me. I think people will be impressed with the program, which includes:

Welcome and Introduction - Tristan Goode

Introduction to OpenStack - Joshua McKenty

Demonstration - Sina Sadeghi

NeCTAR Research Cloud: OpenStack in Production - Tom Fifeld

Bare metal provisioning with OpenStack - Devananda van der Veen

Intro to Swift for New Contributors - John Dickinson

All-around OpenStack storage with Ceph - Florian Haas

Writing API extensions for Nova - Christopher Yeoh

The OpenStack Metering Project - Angus Salkeld

Lightweight PaaS on the NCI OpenStack Cloud - Kevin Pulo

Enabling Compute Clusters atop OpenStack - Enis Afgan

Shared Panel with Open Government

The Open Government Miniconf: this is the other OpenStack relevant miniconf on Tuesday. This might seem like a bit of a stretch, but as best as I can tell there is massive interest in government at the moment in deploying cloud infrastructure, and now is the time to be convincing the decision makers that open clouds based on open source are the right way to go. OpenStack has a lot to offer in the private cloud space, and we need to as a community make sure that people are aware of the various options that are out there. This is why there is a shared panel at the end of the day with the OpenStack miniconf.

Wednesday

There aren't any OpenStack talks on Wednesday, but I am really hoping that someone will propose an OpenStack BoF via the wiki. I'd sure go to a BoF.